changing antonyms

[Larry Horn]

At 4:01 PM -0400 5/24/0, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>Well, "hussy' and "housewife" were synonymous (at one time); now some folks
>would reckon they were antonyms. Hardly canonical.
>
>dInIs
>
>Lynne Murphy wrote:
>>Hi all,
>>
>>I'm looking for examples of semantic change in which (at least) one
>>member of an antonym pair changed meaning, such that at least one of the
>>original pair ended up with a different antonym than it had before.
>>Another good type of example would be one in which semantic change
>>happened in one dialect but not another, so that a single word has
>>different antonyms in two dialects.  I don't know if such things exist.
>>

Well, there's good/bad/baaad (the one whose comparative is "badder" rather
than "worse").  Not sure if that's exactly what you're looking for, though.


larry